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Dementia, Slave Trade, YouTube, More: Tuesday Buzz, October 6th, 2015

Fascinating. There is now a dementia toolkit for small museums. “Tunbridge Wells Museum and Art Gallery has launched a dementia toolkit for small to medium sized museums based on a research project it undertook with the Alzheimer’s Society in West Kent and Canterbury Christ Church University. The two-year project, which was a finalist in the 2015 Dementia Friendly Awards, looked at the effects of object handling on the wellbeing of people with early to mid-stage dementia. The research found that there were marked and measurable increases in wellbeing after people took part in the object handling.”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is going to expand. “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, an online database providing information about slaves and slave trading voyages, will soon expand to include information about intra-American slave trade as well as have a new accessibility….This new project aims to add in-depth information about individual slaves to the database’s catalogue of information regarding voyages, the number of slaves on the voyages, where the voyages landed and more.”

YouTube is going to expand its shopping links to more videos. “The video-sharing site, owned by Google, already lets advertisers show links to products within their own videos. But the new service would place product ads on any video on the site, like product reviews uploaded by amateur reviewers, provided the clip’s owner opts in.”

USEFUL STUFF

Interesting list: 37 Whistleblowers You Can Follow on Twitter. “Edward Snowden joined Twitter on September 29 and already has 1.37 million followers and counting. Just seven tweets by the famed NSA whistleblower almost immediately prompted George Pataki to call for Twitter to ban the account, though Twitter does not appear to be taking the bait. It’s worth noting, however, that Snowden isn’t the only whistleblower on Twitter. Here’s a rundown of 36 others.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Diana Kimball on Medium has a very thoughtful essay: Save for Later: Bookmarking Apps and the Wish Economy. “The Bookmark represents what we wish for. It’s the earliest indicator of intention, and the most vulnerable; by definition, the act of saving something for later means that whatever we hope for hasn’t happened yet. Bookmarks are placeholders for the future. By thumbing through them, we can start to see what might happen next.” Also she wrote this entire essay and never once used the word “curate”.

Wired: What We Can Learn From the Epic Failure of Google Flu Trends. “When Google quietly euthanized the program, called Google Flu Trends (GFT), it turned the poster child of big data into the poster child of the foibles of big data. But GFT’s failure doesn’t erase the value of big data. What it does do is highlight a number of problematic practices in its use—what we like to call ‘big data hubris.’ The value of the data held by entities like Google is almost limitless, if used correctly. That means the corporate giants holding these data have a responsibility to use it in the public’s best interest.”

Apparently Twitter confirmed Jack Dorsey as new CEO in an SEC filing on September 30. Why be so coy about it, then? “Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey is the new full time CEO of Twitter. The Board of Directors of Twitter made the decision already on September 30 according to an SEC filing. Rumors have been already flying since days that Jack Dorsey will take the CEO post. He already was the interim CEO replacing Dick Costelo since July.”

Twitter apparently has a 136-page handbook for politicians and I had to check and make sure this link wasn’t The Onion. “The manual has been ‘wildly popular,’ said Bridget Coyne, a manager on Twitter’s Government and Elections Partnership Team who helped put the manual together (see below for more of our interview with her). ‘We don’t want to make assumptions. We want to make sure that people feel empowered with the full story of what Twitter is.'” I won’t bore you with a Politiwhoops zinger, but read the comments. They’re nice and snarky.

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

The Trump Hotel Collection has confirmed a credit card breach. “In a Web site created to share details about the hack, The Trump Hotel Collection said the breach affects customers who used their credit or debit cards at the hotels between May 19, 2014, and June 2, 2015.”